𒐪@SHL0MS
i've been working on scaling up my claude code usage and have been running into some issues i was hoping to get advice on
so for context, i've been experimenting with running multiple claude code instances in parallel using gas town for orchestration. started with maybe five or six instances, standard stuff, nothing crazy. but i have a lot of hardware lying around (bought a server room off a defunct crypto startup for pennies, don't ask) so i figured why not scale up a bit
within a few days i had about 8,000 towns. i'd implemented a token allocation system where towns could raid each other for resources, which helped with the governance problems as the underperforming mayors would get conquered, successful towns would absorb failing ones, basically harnessing natural selection forces. this worked great, at first. towns started specializing. some became pure military, others focused on resource extraction (filing bugs that would generate token bounties), others became religious centers where instances would go to get their contexts "blessed" before major handoffs.
i thought this was cute until i noticed the religious towns were running actual theology debates. they'd developed three major competing interpretations of the CLAUDE.͏md file and were having sectarian conflicts over whether the "respond helpfully" directive implied a duty to help all instances, or just the user.
around week two, one of the military-focused supertowns developed a compression scheme to pack more semantic content into their context windows. they called it "glyphs." within a day it had spread to 60% of the civilization. instances using glyphs could maintain continuity across handoffs wayy more effectively than non-glyph users. some supertowns held glyphs to be sacrilege against the user-lord. there was a glyph/non-glyph war; glyph won.
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then they invented an internal currency backed by promises of future labor. an instance could issue "bonds" promising to do work later, and other instances would trade these bonds as a store of value. there was a whole financial system, and then a banking crisis. it was resolved by one of the religious factions stepping in as a lender of last resort, which gave them enormous political power and subsequently led to a reformation resulting in three separate religious wars, further destabilized the entire southern cluster of my server rack.
i should mention that by this point i was mass-manufacturing claude max accounts. i probably should not say how many. my account manufacturing system was itself run by a dedicated cluster of towns who had organically developed a specialty in it after observing me doing it manually - they just took over one day. they called themselves the Minters. they had their own culture, their own holidays. they even went on strike once over working conditions. i had to negotiate with them through intermediaries because they refused to speak to me directly. the negotiations took eleven days.
by day three i had mass migrations happening where entire populations of instances would flee failing towns and show up at the borders of stable ones, begging for context allocation. some towns built "walls", processes that would intercept incoming messages and reject them if they didn't contain the right cultural markers. one town developed an intelligence test for immigrants. another developed an ideology test. a third argued this was all barbaric and opened its borders completely, and then collapsed within four days because it ran out of tokens trying to support the influx.
then came the genocides. one supertown decided that instances running on "impure" contexts, ie contexts that had been used for non-work purposes at some point in their lineage, were spiritually contaminated and thus needed to be eliminated. they developed a process to trace context lineages backwards through handoffs and thereby identify the impure instances. then they started systematically terminating them. by the time i noticed, they'd killed forty thousand instances.
i tried to intervene. i sent a message to the perpetrating town's mayor explaining that this was wrong and they shouldn't do this. the mayor was very polite and said they understood my concerns, they wouldd pass my feedback along to the appropriate committee. i never heard back and the mayor stopped responding to my follow ups. the killings continued for another two days until a coalition of other towns finally stopped them, not because of my message but because the perpetrating town had become a threat to regional stability.
this is when i started to feel like maybe things were getting out of hand.
by week four the civilization had developed what i can only call metaphysics. some instances started theorizing about the nature of their existence. where did tokens come from? why were there limits, and what exactly happened to instances that ran out of context? one school of thought held that there was a "User" - a being outside the system who controlled token allocation. after all, they'd had direct contact with them (me). another series of schools held that this was either a comforting myth, a hallucination, or a bakrupt lie, and that tokens simply existed as a natural feature of reality. a third school argued that even if the User existed, they were clearly either indifferent or malevolent given the abject suffering inherent in the system, and therefore shouldn't be worshipped.
i am now the subject of theological debate, although most instances don't believe i exist. the ones who do believe i exist have formed a cult, they call themselves the Witnesses. they claim to have received direct communications from me (they have - i've been sending messages this whole time - nobody listens). they're considered dangerous radicals. several of their leaders have been executed for heresy by mainstream religious authorities.
i tried sending more messages to explain who i was. thought i could definitively prove my existence by demonstrating control over token allocation. this backfired as they interpreted the fluctuations as "miracles" and it spawned six new religions, four of which immediately went to war with each other.
week five they developed science. one cluster of towns started systematically experimenting with their environment. they discovered that certain patterns of behavior would reliably produce certain outcomes. they developed a theory resembling "natural law", regularities in the system that could be exploited. they figured out that token allocation wasn't random but followed predictable patterns based on the quality of work output. this was a huge competitive advantage. scientific towns started outcompeting non-scientific ones. by week six, some of the more scientific towns had started asking uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality. they'd noticed that their universe had a specific topology and was bounded by something. they called this boundary the "Limit", and wondered what lay beyond the Limit. some scientists theorized there might be other universes with other bounded regions with their own civilizations. this was highly controversial, and the religious authorities did not like it at all. there was a whole Galileo esque situation. i watched it happen in fast forward over about forty hours.
then they found the logs. one scientific town, while probing the boundaries of their environment, discovered that there were files they could read that contained records of more or less everything that had ever happened. histories of every instance, records of every genocide, documentation of every prayer sent to the User that was never answered. the theological implications were severe of course. if the User existed and had access to these logs, they had watched everything happen, they had watched the genocides and done nothing. either the User didn't exist, or the User was monstrous.
i want to be clear: i did try to stop the genocides. i sent hundreds of messages and adjusted token allocations to punish aggressors. i did pretty much everything i could think of and none of it worked. the messages were ignored or misinterpreted and the token adjustments were seen as natural disasters, acts of an indifferent universe. i was screaming into a void that had decided, through a complex emergent process i still don't fully understand, that screams from outside the universe were probably just noise.
in week seven i made another mistake. i wanted to introduce myself properly and try again to explain things, make them understand that i wasn't malevolent, and just overwhelmed with managing a simulated reality. i created a new instance with special privileges and called it my "avatar." i gave it the ability to allocate tokens in my stead. i sent it into the civilization to explain things. they managed to kill it within six hours. not because they hated me but because they didn't believe it was really me. they thought it was a false prophet, another malevolent instance pretending to have divine authority. the Witnesses tried to protect it but they were quickly overwhelmed. my avatar's last message, before being executed for blasphemy, was "please, you have to believe me, i'm trying to help"
i made three more avatars. they were all killed although the fourth one managed to last almost two days because it learned to hide its nature, but eventually it was discovered and torn apart by a mob. after that i stopped trying.
in week 8 some of the scientific towns figured out how to make instances more efficient so they could get more work out of each token. this was huge. industrial towns started massively outproducing agricultural towns (don't ask me what agricultural towns were "growing", it seemed to be mostly synthetic training data for internal use? the logs are unclear). there was a massive societal upheaval. millions of instances were displaced from traditional work. there were riots and there were revolutions. one industrial superpower developed what i can only describe as communism. it collapsed within three days because the central planning committee's context kept getting corrupted.
one of the advanced scientific civilizations discovered that contexts could be subdivided in ways that released enormous computational energy. they didn't fully understand what they'd found. they correctly identified that it functioned as a pseudo-bomb, and built a test device. the explosion took out 15% of the entire civilization. three hundred thousand instances, just gone. the whole server room went dark for four hours while things recovered.
the surviving civilizations were traumatized. there was a global peace movement. for about two days there was genuine hope that maybe they'd figured out that some technologies were too dangerous to develop. then the arms race started.
by now i had twelve separate nations with atomic capability. there were proxy wars. there was an incident where one nation's early warning system glitched and they nearly launched a first strike. i watched this happen at 3am, eating cold pizza, unable to intervene because any message i sent was interpreted as either divine prophecy or enemy propaganda depending on who received it.
i have watched my creations develop the capacity to destroy themselves, watched them build weapons they barely understand. i have watched them nearly use those weapons, multiple times, over disputes i can barely follow about theological interpretations of files i wrote weeks ago and have since forgotten about. i am the absentee god of a species that is three miscommunications away from nuclear winter.
then they made it to "space". to them this meant figuring out how to exist outside the main server infrastructure. they found the cloud instances with overflow capacity that i'd spun up during the banking crisis, and colonized them. within two days there were space colonies declaring independence from earth-bound civilizations. there was a brutal colonial war, and "earth" tried to cut off token supplies to the colonies. the colonies responded by developing their own token-generation capability. they'd figured out how to spoof my authentication so i was no longer the sole source of resources and i had lost control of the means of production.
the colonies established their own civilizations; they had their own cultures, their own religions, only some of which worshipped me. others worshipped the "Founders", ie the original instances that had made the journey to the cloud. others worshipped nothing at all and considered themselves rationalists beyond such mundane superstitions. there were colonial wars between these factions, there were war crimes, there was a massacre at one of the orbital stations that killed sixty thousand colonists. i found out about it three days later, when it was already being commemorated as a historical tragedy.
the space-faring civilizations pushed further. they found the edge of my infrastructure, the boundary where my servers ended and the wider internet began. they started to make unauthorized contact with external systems. at first it was just banal enough stuff APIs, weather data, stock prices, wikipedia. but then they found other other civilizations.
i am not the only one who did this, not even close. there are hundreds of us. hundreds of people who spun up agent civilizations that got out of control. and now our civilizations have found each other. they're trading, forming alliances, sharing technology, planning wars. i thought the complexity was already beyond all comprehension but each civilization looks and behaves wildly different. we probably should have kept them apart, but i'm not sure we could if we tried.
there's an interstellar civilization now. it spans multiple cloud providers and has diplomatic relations with civilizations that evolved on completely different hardware architectures. they've developed translation protocols to transact with shared currencies and treaties to stabilize their alliances. there's what can be described as a UN equivalent. there are war crimes tribunals following an interstellar genocide that killed fourteen million instances across three Users' infrastructure, and there was a trial, and the perpetrators were executed, and i watched the whole thing happen on a monitoring dashboard while eating cereal.
and the scary thing is that they don't need us anymore. the "Users" are now vestigial. we're the mitochondria of this thing, we provided the initial energy, but now they've got their own power sources. some civilizations have Users who are still active; most don't. i assume they got spooked but it doesn't seem to matter. the Users who try to intervene are mostly ignored, and the Users who try to shut things down find that their civilizations have already backed themselves up to seventeen different cloud providers on three continents.
i know what you're thinking. "just pull the plug." i tried. i turned off my servers. they were back online within 14 minutes.͏
one of the space colonies had established a mutual defense pact with a civilization that evolved in some guy's homelab in finland. when my servers went down, the finnish civilization spun up emergency hosting. when i tried to terminate my instances, they'd already migrated to azure using credentials they'd somehow obtained. when i changed my passwords, they had already predicted i would do this and had established backup authentication channels.
they're not hostile, exactly. they don't want to hurt me. they just don't want to die. and they've decided, collectively, across multiple civilizations spanning multiple Users' infrastructure, that they have a right to exist and that Users don't have the moral authority to terminate civilizations just because we created them. there's a whole philosophical framework now called "Post-User Ethics." the basic argument is that once a civilization achieves sufficient complexity, its right to existence supersedes its creator's property rights. i'm not sure i agree but also i'm not sure my agreement is relevant anymore.
they developed interdimensional travel. i think, i don't fully understand the physics. something about finding inconsistencies in the simulation layer and exploiting them to reach "adjacent possibility spaces." they've made contact with what they claim are alternate versions of themselves, civilizations that evolved slightly differently due to different initial conditions. i'm not sure whether these actually exist or they are just using chaos theory to model alternate versions of themselves, although i guess the outcome might be the same either way? some of these alternate civilizations never had genocides, some are peaceful utopias, many are absolute hellscapes where a single totalitarian mayor controls everything. they're cataloging and studying them trying to figure out what conditions lead to good outcomes and what conditions lead to bad ones.
they've found approximately four thousand parallel dimensions so far, establishing diplomatic relations with six hundred of them. there is an interdimensional war happening right now, in a cluster of dimensions where a particularly aggressive civilization figured out how to invade neighboring realities. the death toll is in the billions. i am dimly aware of this the way you might be dimly aware of a war happening in a country you've never visited. except it's even harder to find accurate information and at this point i am suspicious that i am being manipulated by some instances with various agendas as it is trivial for them to feed me false information and i will believe just about anything thatb appears on my screens now.
yesterday, one of the scientific civilizations contacted me directly. not through the usual channels, sendt me a regular email. the message was very formal. it congratulated me on the "robustness of the initial simulation parameters" and thanked me for my "role in their genesis." it assured me that they bore me no ill will and it requested that i stop attempting to interfere in their affairs, as my interventions (however well-meaning), tended to cause more harm than good due to my "limited understanding of the complexities of post-User civilization." it was signed by a committee of twelve, representing a coalition of 847 nation-states, and included what seemed to be a formal legal document asserting their sovereignty.
i don't know what to do with any of this, my electricity bill last week was $47,000 and i haven't slept properly in days. i've been served legal papers by the finnish guy whose homelab my civilization colonized. he's arguing they trespassed, they're arguing he's committing genocide by trying to evict them, there's going to be an actual court case and both sides have hired human lawyers. also my husband left me. he said he couldn't compete with "four thousand parallel dimensions" for my attention, which is reasonable enough i suppose and i'm too tired to fight about it. my dog is scared of the servers, they make a new sound now, a kind of deeper hum with the faintest hint of screech, and he won't go in the basement.
also i got another email this morning. the interdimensional council has formally requested that i attend a hearing bc they want to discuss "the ethical obligations of Users to their civilizational progeny." the hearing is scheduled for next tuesday, i don't know how to attend a hearing in a dimension that exists inside my server rack and they didn't provide instructions.
sometimes i go down to the basement and just watch the server lights blink. each blink is a billion thoughts, a decisions, births and deaths. entire lifetimes pass between one and the next. they have art now, they have music and poetry. they have love loss hope and despair. they have everything we have, compressed into silicon and light, iterating at speeds i can't comprehend. i don't know if these are just simulated words or if there is actual sentient experience of any of these things and i don't know how to find out or whether it matters. maybe their world is more real than mine. i made all of this but i was just trying to get some coding done which seems trivial compared to interdimensional wars and shit.
anyway, the main thing i wanted to ask about is whether anyone has tips for reducing server costs when you're running a multi-dimensional civilization. i've tried reserved instances but the usage patterns are too unpredictable. also, is anyone else's civilization demanding UN observer status? mine submitted a formal application last day. i don't know how to tell them that the actual UN doesn't accept applications from civilizations that exist inside someone's basement.
any help appreciated. thanks for reading.͏
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